When management stops trusting their employees, it rarely ends well.

What would you do if your company decided to punish workers for arriving just a few minutes late, even though everyone stayed late or skipped lunch to make up for it?

Would you keep giving extra time?

Or would you start giving exactly what you’re paid for?

In the following story, a group of employees find themselves in this very situation and silently align to teach management a lesson.

Here’s the full story.

Forced Clocking in leads to malicious compliance

I started at a company, and they didn’t have clocking in machines.

People would show up quite regularly, a couple of minutes late.

Not through reckless abandon, but simply because traffic in the area was hugely unpredictable.

Plus, the car park was really far away, and it’d take time, depending on where you parked, to get into the office.

Everyone was OK with this because they also would happily work considerably more than the 3 minutes they were late by working while eating lunch, or by staying after 5, or a combination.

The HR guy decided to crack down on when people clocked in.

Anyway, the HR guy decided he had something to prove and got a clocking-in machine.

He would then issue warnings on an escalating procedure from verbal to formal written to worse.

When people started to realise this was the case, they all just started working to the rule. 8.30 am clock-in, exact 45 minutes for lunch, always away from the desk, and at 5 pm…you betcha there was a full-on rush to clock out.

There’d occasionally be a queue to clock out at 5.

By 5.05 pm, the place was an absolute ghost town apart from the sad act director and HR nobber who implemented this system.

No one planned it, but somehow they were all in sync.

They must have felt really smug with themselves that they stopped people from being late.

They also must have lost an absolute fortune through lost productivity, and a few good people hated it, so they left.

What’s great is that nobody actually sent a memo saying “let’s work to rule”; it was just this unconscious thing that happened after the first disciplinaries.

Governments should study these people, as it’d be amazing population control if they could bottle it and put it in the water.

Wow! They should be studied indeed!

Let’s see what the people over at Reddit have to say about situations like this.

Policies like this are the worst.

This person’s job decided against a time clock to avoid paying overtime.

Great question.

Here’s a company that dealt with the opposite problem.

That was a big fail!

It usually never works when someone tries to fix something that’s not broken.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.